


Itinerant

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: KNBxNBA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 10:09:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15555423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: Even though he’s never here, he’s always coming home to it.





	Itinerant

**Author's Note:**

> nets!shuu
> 
> some nijihimu, but not enough to tag.
> 
> this is a story about airplane anxiety

The mouth guard feels alien clenched between Shuuzou’s jaws outside of a game. No crowd cheers or yells; no Jumbotron flashes fireworks overhead. The plane smells of stale air, not sweat and the rank clinging scent of a gym, and though the mechanical hum of the jet engine slices through the silence and Shuuzou’s chances of sleeping, it’s the worst kind of distraction. It makes Shuuzou think about all the little gears and bits going into keeping them afloat above the clouds, and he grinds his teeth harder into the mouth guard. And then he thinks about how wrong it feels again.

He’d rather a brief discomfort than wearing away his teeth (not like even on a cushy chartered flight he can get comfortable), but it’s another thing to wear away on his thoughts and lead him back the circuitous route to certain doom. The engines will stall; they will plummet below into a lake, or some farmer’s cornfield, or a highway full of semi trucks holding flammable gases. His body—no. Shuuzou checks himself and bites his lip, shrugging his shoulders in a fruitless attempt to offload some of the tension.

Across the aisle, one of the rookies is bent over his laptop. The screen’s bright, like the sun wrapping its tentacles of light around the sun visor in Shuuzou’s car when he’s heading over the bridge in the early evening to catch one of Tatsuya’s games in a Knicks bar. He scowls and shuts his eyes; dark rectangles hover over his vision, the shape and location of the screen. Shuuzou unbuckles his seatbelt and stands up, ducking under the overhead bin. His head is a few inches from the plane ceiling; he can’t really stretch his arms unless he turns awkwardly, but they’ve all done weird shit on planes. (Even if they hadn’t, Shuuzou really couldn’t give a shit.)

His shoulders pop as he finally stretches them; none of his lucky sleeping teammates seem to notice. That, Shuuzou supposes, must be the benefit of this much travel, a sweeping spread across the country that takes them through the Midwest and down California through Arizona and Texas, that by the time they’re on the last leg back to New York everyone’s so tired the lightest sleepers will snore through a sonic boom.

Shuuzou had almost slept through the flight into Houston, woken up by his own nightmare, the squeal of brakes on asphalt even though he’d been walking on a faulty wooden boardwalk that had left his heart firing like a video game AK47. Tonight, though, he’s too busy thinking to sleep, about all the dangers he’s too late to opt out of and about his teeth against the plastic, about having that dream again, about the double-digit minutes until he’s finally on the ground in New York again that seem to warp and twist away from him. He’d hate traveling even if it was all buses and trains and cars, for the hours lost to waiting and having to simply exist in transit, the loss of sense of days and nights and time spent, the beds that aren’t his own. But it’s all that, and flying on top like a rotten cherry.

He shouldn’t be so dramatic. This is so little to put up with when he’s playing for the best basketball league in the world, when there are hundreds of millions of people in this country and fewer than four hundred roster spots. He’s earned his way in, and he’s earning his keep, but it took luck and circumstances to get him here and he shouldn’t complain about a little relative discomfort, if only to himself. He’s putting up with comfortable seating on an aircraft, a flight that’s at most six or seven hours, and this is something he’s going to have to get used to.

(So he’s been doing this since college and he’s twenty-six and still not used to it; it takes a while. It’s better than it was. He’s better than he was, but he’d be better still if he had Tatsuya next to him, soft hand on his knee and warm body leaning up against his, Shuuzou’s last line of defense that they’re in this together, no matter how they end up.

A yawn forces its way up through Shuuzou’s throat. Exhaustion isn’t the problem; he’s been getting his sleep in quick naps and uneasy nights the whole trip, falling asleep in front of the hotel TV and waking with a snap when the commercial comes on, getting up to turn it off and then he’s too wide awake to drift off again. Practices, games, overtimes, logging more minutes than he’s used to because one of the other forwards went down and the backups are shaky. Shuuzou’s knees hurt and his arms are heavy and his back is tight. He writes a mental note that he’ll probably forget until it’s too late about getting some time on the massage table tomorrow after practice, and yawns again. At some point he’ll crash, but it’s already too late to get anything like quality sleep here. It’s probably better to remain awake, but at that thought his body finally decides fuck it; this is an airplane but he still really needs to lie down. Or get into a close approximation.

Shuuzou drifts off halfway, face smushed against the window cover. It doesn’t leave any marks on the side of his face (Shuuzou’s slept on rugs that have, and it’s taken way too damn long for the imprints to fade). He shoulders his bags and waves to one of the assistant coaches as he leaves, already on autopilot through the airport straight to the cabs (it would be nice to have someone to pick him up, but it’s not something he and Tatsuya have ever discussed, nor is it probably doable—but it’s a nice fantasy to keep him awake while he waits in line for a cab that’s willing to go to Park Slope).

The cab he does get smells like stale cigarettes even with the windows all open, and the cabbie asks Shuuzou twice if he’s sure the talk radio is fine. It’s in a language Shuuzou doesn’t understand, no familiar syllables he can latch onto, but the shape of all of this is familiar enough. It’s home now, his elbow resting on a black duffel bag, his throat dry and his eyes feeling the weight of high-rise apartment buildings. Even though he’s never here, he’s always coming home to it—it sounds deep, on the surface. It probably won’t when he’s more awake, but it doesn’t have to.

Falling asleep is always easier in his own bed, when he has the rhythm of Tatsuya’s breathing to go by, and when he opens his eyes to the familiar shadow of the windowpanes outlined on the ceiling by the streetlight below. No jet engines, no mouth guard, ten floors up but firmly rooted to the ground.


End file.
